After receiving advice on how to deal with the decimation of her tomatoes this summer, a Cookstown woman has stumbled upon the unlikely source of her problem by setting up cider traps at night. 

Convinced that slugs and snails were devouring her legendary vegetables, a local gardening expert advised Mary McNally to trap the shelled gastropods by using small doses of cider inside bottle tops. It was only when she heard a rustling outside one night that she caught the culprit:

“It was the husband all along. He’d put the gardener up to saying to me about the cider so he could go out and get sloshed in the garden whilst I slept. I looked out one night and there he was, off his head drinking the cider from the bottle tops, singing rebel songs, and, to top it all off, eating the snails himself as well as the tomatoes.”

John McNally admitted to the cider/snail/tomato consumption when caught red-handed and has since added SatNav to his phone so that his wife knows where he is at any given time of the night.

NcNally also denies any wrongdoing in the poor carrot crop this year in his garden despite his wife, suspiciously now, again being told by the same expert gardener to leave beer and dirty magazines beside the carrots to ward off bats and badgers.